Yahoo! News . Be Better, Go Green, Win Cabs and Bulbs

by Kris   ⋅   May 14, 2007   ⋅   Comment now   ⋅    RSS

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if zero emission vehicles were the norm? Well at least hybrids are gaining popularity, even though some owners are cited as “holier than thou” snobs.

Vancouver Canada’s Andrew Grant was the world’s first hybrid taxi driver back in 2000. Two ex-City lawyers recently started London-based Green Tomato Cars replete with a Prius fleet. San Francisco was the first to introduce hybrid taxis in the US a couple of years ago; Chicago, New York and Boston followed suit later.

Although NYC started off with Ford Escape SUV hybrids, at present you can easily hail a Prius and even an egg yolk yellow Lexus RX400H taxi but you’re not allowed to eat or drink on board. Today Yahoo! donated a fleet of brand new hybrid cabs to NYC with Y! branding that will act as quiet but not silent reminders of Yahoo’s nation-wide contest. Matt Dillon helped kick off Yahoo!’s search for the “America’s Greenest City” in New York’s Times Square.

This coincides with Yahoo!’s recently launched environmental cause sites Yahoo! Green, 18Seconds.org, Be a Better Planet, where you can earn and track points of your selfless self and other greenies to win a hybrid taxi fleet (or equivalent cash donation for green projects) for your city. The winning state will be announced on June 8th. And hey, even if you don’t win a cab, you can get some nifty compact fluorescent light bulbs.

Surprisingly (or not surprisingly depending on how you look at it), supposedly nature-friendly California sucks at saving the Earth, and the Central States are kicking ass! Check out the handy dandy U.S. map ranking grid for yourself.